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The international movement calling for a boycott against Israel on Thursday said its website was repeatedly attacked earlier this year and raised suspicions that Israel was behind the attacks. The BDS movement released a report Thursday showing that its main website suffered six attacks in February and March. The denial of service attacks, which work by flooding a target website with bogus traffic, knocked out the BDS website for several hours at a time. The report, compiled by nonprofit online security service eQualit.ie, said the attacks had a level of “sophistication and commitment” it normally does not see. It also...

Missing EgyptAir flight MS804 had reportedly been forced to make three emergency landings in the 24 hours leading up to crash. The Airbus 320 is said to have been forced to turn around shortly after takeoff on three separate occasions after it's warning systems signalled an anomaly onboard. The claims, made in French media, have since been denied by the Egyptian lead crash investigation committee.

At some point in the second term of any presidency, the soaring eagle becomes a lame-duck with more quack than quake in its steps. With his place in history assured, President Obama has forged a new healthcare regime, restored relations with Cuba, made unprecedented visits and negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran. The latter of these strains U.S. relations with America's staunchest Middle East allies — Israel and Saudi Arabia — beyond credulity, and suggests the president may be too absorbed in creating his own legacy to think clearly. Obama called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) "the most...

Laplace's equipment picked up the "signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders," the Egyptian statement read. It added that a second ship, the John Lethbridge, affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week. Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders can be picked up from deep underwater. The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about...

Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world. Egypt was a...

The mammoth, multi-million-dollar mansion where resident Barack Obama and his family will reportedly live after the first family exits the White House is located 1,096 feet from the Islamic Center of Washington — one of the largest mosques in the Western Hemisphere. ... The exterior of the Islamic Center features horseshoe arches, Arabic script and tall, ornate minaret. The building is surrounded by an array of flags representing the countries of the world where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion. ... In addition to the Islamic Center of Washington, the embassy of Oman and the former embassy of Iran are very...

On May 15, Al-Alam TV broadcast a report on the opening of the third International Holocaust Cartoon Contest in Tehran. The exhibition features caricatures of Israeli PM Netanyahu, comparing him to Hitler and to ISIS terrorists. The organizer, Shojai Tabtabai, said that the exhibition was "a response to the publication of cartoons by the French Charlie Hebdo magazine, which affronted the Prophet Muhammad, as well as an expression of [our opposition] to the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people." Reporter: "As a form of expression of the Palestinian cause, and in the context of the massacres, perpetrated by the Zionists...

An engineer stands next to a Hellenic Air Force C-130 HAUP aircraft at the 133rd Hellenic Air Force Base in Kasteli on the island of Crete, Greece, May 20, 2016. The plane is participating in a search operation for the missing EgyptAir flight 804 Airbus A320. Credit: Stefanos Rapanis/REUTERS

Egyptian political commentator Nabih Al-Wahsh accused Israel of downing EgyptAir Flight 804, and called for Egyptians and Arabs to kill any Israeli they come across and to mutilate his body. Al-Wahsh, a lawyer, filed a lawsuit with Egyptian courts four years ago in an attempt to abolish the Camp David Accords. Al-Asseema TV presenter tried to stop Al-Wahsh from inciting to violence, but to no avail, as Al-Wahsh called for the establishment of “death squads” that would hunt down Israelis all over the world. The show aired on May 20. Nabih Al-Wahsh: "All the evidence indicates that the filthy Zionist...

In significant news that has thus far either gone under or outright unreported by the media, U.S. military advisors have “boots on the ground” in Yemen, according to a recent report in the Washington Post by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Missy Ryan: “The Pentagon has placed a small number of U.S. advisors on the ground in Yemen to support Arab forces battling al-Qaeda, military officials said on Friday, signaling a new American role in that country’s multi-sided civil war. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said U.S. personnel had been in the country for about two weeks, supporting Yemeni and...

White House hints that time for new Gaza policy is near. WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Wednesday that it had warned Israel's government repeatedly to use "caution and restraint" with half a dozen aid boats bound for the Gaza Strip before Israeli commandos raided the flotilla this week in an operation that killed nine people. In an interview with Charlie Rose broadcast Wednesday night, Vice President Joe Biden agreed that Israel had a right to inspect the cargo. "You can argue whether Israel should have dropped people onto that ship or not ... but the truth of the matter...

Iran is an artificial country which includes a large number of ethnic groups: Persians, Azars, Kurds, Turkmen, Baloch, Arabs and more.... Southwestern Iran, the Khuzistan region, is home to the Arab minority group, but that is where most of the oil and gas resources are to be found underground, right under the feet of that Arab minority. They are Shiites, exactly like the majority Persians, but are treated with disdain by the government. In the past, the region was called Arabistan to allude to the ethnic group living there, but after the 1925 Persian Conquest, the Persians changed its name...

An elderly Coptic Christian woman was attacked by a wild mob last week, who stripped her naked and paraded her down the streets of Minya, south of Cairo. Rioters also attacked Christian homes in Minya, raiding at least seven before burning them to the ground. Local police say the incident was sparked by rumors of an affair between the elderly woman’s son and a Muslim woman. Incensed by the rumors, rioters sacked the Christian woman’s home, dragging her out to the street before beating her, stripping her, and forcing her to walk the streets naked as members of the mob...

An Iranian delegation wrapped up its visit to Saudi Arabia on Friday without signing a final agreement on arrangements for the annual Hajj pilgrimage, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah has said. The ministry said the delegation decided to return to Tehran without signing the final agreement despite two days of extensive talks. “The Iranian Organization of Hajj and Visit will be held responsible before God and the people of Iran for the inability of its pilgrims to perform Hajj this year,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency. The ministry said it offered...

A mob ransacked and torched seven Christian homes in a province south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, after rumors spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman, according to a statement by the local Orthodox Coptic church. Released late Wednesday, it said that during the May 20 attack, the mother of the Christian man, who had fled the village, was publicly stripped of her clothes by the mob to humiliate her.

Greece has reportedly sent the last audio recordings of the doomed EgyptAir flight 804 on Thursday to the investigating teams in Cairo. The investigating team has also received radar imagery and audio recordings from Greece what would purportedly detail the flight’s final trajectory. This has come a day after Egypt reported contracted two foreign companies to help locate the flight data recorders of the carrier's plane that crashed last week in the Mediterranean, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board.

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The Egyptian army said on Wednesday that its forces have killed 88 militants in central and North Sinai during recent military operations. As a continuation of an earlier campaign which started in September 2015, the army announced that it will begin the third phase of the operation entitled Martyr's Right. Martyr's Right is a comprehensive military operation targeting Islamist militants in North Sinai.

EgyptAir Flight 804 that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on May 19, 2016 had been tagged two years ago with graffiti that read in Arabic “We will bring this plane down.” The words “traitor” and “murderer” were also written in messages directed at Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Security officials attributed the graffiti to the work of aviation workers at Cairo Airport who were protesting former General el-Sisi after he ousted the elected president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Speaking on the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement last week, President of the Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, declared that the old Middle East created by European imperialism was dead – and that an independent Kurdish state must be part of the emerging new order. Referring to the secret arrangement by the Allied Powers in World War I to divide the Middle East into “spheres of influence”, Barzani blasted the Sykes-Picot Agreement, saying that it denied the rights of the inhabitants and carved up populations with arbitrary lines. The agreement served as the basis for the establishment of the modern...